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Experimental Photography

Jonah Adshead

Movement capturing.I carried out these experiments to explore the different effects I could achieve playing with movement and settings such as shutter speed. I captured movement in a number of ways and think that some of the images that I got looked quite good.When taking some images I used with a very slow shutter speed I used a tripod to ensure I didn’t get camera shake. One thing I experimented with while the camera was on the tripod was spinning it around while the photograph was taking and the shutter was open. I think this gave a nice moving, blurred effect especially on stationary objects such as parked cars. By playing around with how fast I spun the camera or how long the shutter speed was I could make the blur more severe or tweak it so the subject is blurred less and there is quite a focussed image of the object on each side of the frame.Using the tripod again and having a long shutter speed but this time keeping the camera stationary and fixed in position helped me capture movement of moving objects such as people walking. You can see their movement trails and where people may have stopped for a moment you can see a more clear image of them causing an interesting variation in the images. I think this gives the image a quite ghostly effect that works nicely and could be easily experimented further by setting up shots rather than just photographing passers by as I was. Introducing lights and more interesting movements such as dance could increase the appeal of the image with not much effort.Another interesting technique I experimented with was “barrel rolling” the zoom while the shutter was open and the image was taking. This allowed me to achieve an interesting warped in effect where the image zoomed into a centre point. Experimenting more with the speed in which I zoomed in or whether I zoomed in and then out in one exposure allowed me to explore the possibilities of this technique and produce some nice images.

Blur

When taking the blurred photographs I first set the camera into manual focus to allow myself to have full control over how blurry the images were. I found quite quickly that for an image to look good it must have quite a lot going on it in with quite clear either lines or colours to separate different objects within the frame. This is why photographs of things like the structure of the ceiling at college, parked cars and the vending machine worked quite well.When experimenting I explored the results I would get by making images very blurred or just slightly blurred. Very blurred photographs made the objects within the image often just look like blobs- sometimes a desirable effect that worked well, but often didn’t work well for that subject. Similarly making the image only slightly blurred worked well sometimes, but other times looked as if the blur was unintentional or just looked too plain and the blur wasn’t enough to make the image interesting.

ReflectionsReflections I found quite hard to get good photographs for because as they are everywhere in every window, mirror, car bonnet etc. I found it difficult to find an interesting image I didn’t believe had been taken thousands of times already. I did take some images however and explored what made a reflection photograph interesting. Taking photographs of strange reflective surfaces such as the gum bins and elevator buttons made some good photos and if more time could’ve been spent I could’ve shot some very good ones.

Photomontages

The experiments I did with the photomontages I found to be very enjoyable and I liked this technique. It is a very simple and easy method and is sometimes a bit hit and miss in the automated post production in Photoshop when it arranges the images. All I do is take a range of photographs splitting the scene I want up into sections and take photos in rows from left to right, then move down and go right to left and so on until I have photographed the whole scene.I experimented with moving around and taking photos that were more zoomed in or out than others and including parts of myself in the photos such as an arm or my feet. I think these things worked well and made the images look very good.Leaving the camera in full automatic mode when taking the photographs gave interesting effect I think as in the different photos the camera would change the settings causing some of the exposures to be different so that when put together in Photoshop some images are lighter or darker than others. This looks gives an interesting appearance to the photomontage.